At last, the wired kettle is liberated

A century after the eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla started work on wireless electricity, the days of the ubiquitous electrical power cord may be numbered.

Coming soon are desktops, kitchen benchtops and even play mats that will power any electrical appliance put on top of them.

Just as telecommunication has gone increasingly wireless, a Californian and an English company are racing to develop technology that will liberate electronic gadgets, from mobile phones to kitchen blenders.

US-based MobileWise is offering a mat that looks like a large mouse pad studded with metal contact points. To get power from it, devices need a special chip set that allows them to "talk' to the pad and tell it how much power they need.

MobileWise has already signed up two appliance manufacturers, Samsung and Acer, which are expected to release their first wireless electrical products in the second half of this year.");document.write("

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The technology has already been demonstrated powering a high-definition TV.

MobileWise says it is talking to office furniture manufacturers about building the pads into desktops.

"It'll take a few years for it to become pervasive, but in certain markets such as [mobile] phones we think it will have a significant share of the market within two to three years," said Izhar Matzkevich of MobileWise.

"You'd be able to power devices wherever you go."

A British competitor, SplashPower, has a similar mat called a SplashPad. The difference is that SplashPads use inductive, rather then conductive, electricity - the pads don't need metal contact points and don't have to touch the appliances. The principle is similar to the electromagnetic power transfer used in rechargeable electric toothbrushes.

The big limitation with both the MobileWise and SplashPower products is that the pads still have to be plugged into an ordinary power point.